The abandoned radar station at Montauk Point. Not shown: secret underground
facilities housing thousands of scientists that no one in the area has ever
seen.

Unusual stuff seems
to happen in New York State with unusual regularity. First, Long Island
saw a bad hoax involving a haunted house turned into a movie, The Amityville
Horror, and now people are claiming somewhat similar wacky goings on are
occurring at an abandoned air force base at Montauk Point.

At the eastern end
of Long Island’s southern point, the government set up one of many
gargantuan radar dishes to warn us of any incoming Soviet threats from the
Atlantic. These dishes rapidly went obsolete as we developed better and
better computer technology, and the site was closed in 1969. Though the
building that houses the radar device itself is fenced off from the public,
the land around it has since been donated to the state of New York for use
as a public park.

That much everyone
can agree on. However, this was just a warm-up for conspiracy theorists,
a sort of stretching of the legs for the marathon of madness that is about
the begin. They point out that when the federal government donated the land
to the state of New York, the retained the rights to “everything beneath
the surface” and the right to some day reoccupy the land if made necessary
by a matter of national security.

This, say the conspiracists,
is because the government maintains a secret underground research facility
at Montauk Point. The evidence is varied and almost entirely circumstantial:
conspiracists claim that civilians visiting the park are routinely threatened
by armed government agents ordering them not to venture into certain areas
of the park; electrical workers are rumored to have installed a power station
capable of using gigawatts of energy (enough to power a city); and every
once in a while strange lights or shapes are seen in the skies nearby.

This evidence is entirely
circumstantial. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that conspiracists
will take stories of park rangers trying to keep tourists on the trails
and turn them into government thugs trying to keep the nosy from discovering
their top-secret experiments.
But let’s back up before we get into what the experiments are. I hate
to get into history, but the supposed story of the Montauk Project is much
too awesome to go without. According to the conspiracy theory, in 1945 American
troops had liberated France. Well, that part’s not a conspiracy theory.
That part is true. The conspiracy theory says that some of those troops
discovered a train full of Nazi gold stopped in a tunnel. They notified
the proper authorities, who promptly arrived on the scene, took the gold,
and then killed every single soldier so as to ensure that no one…
well, knew they had some gold, I guess.

Meanwhile, elsewhere
in the crumbling Reich, the Americans were helping German scientists flee
the country with, of course, the provision that they work for the US government
under the guise of Operation Paperclip.

Some of these scientists
were brought back to America, teamed up with the scientists who had worked
on the Philadelphia Experiment, were given the Nazi gold, and a research
facility was built for them underground, beneath the radar system at Montauk
Point.

After constructing
the research facility at Montauk Point, the scientists got busy working
on their various projects. Depending on whether or not you believe everything
you hear, these experiments could include any of the following things: particle
physics research using an experimental particle accelerator, experiments
in time travel or the bending of space, contacting space aliens, inventing
the internet, electromagnetic mind control, building black helicopters,
so on and so forth. It’s also where the moon landings were faked,
to say nothing of the fact that researchers there built a 50-foot tall Pyramid
out of pure titanium, (apparently underground) for some reason.

But it gets better!
Nikolai Tesla, the original Balkan Sensation, is said to have faked his
death, surviving long enough to become director of operations at the facility.
He’s not the only dead man to walk, however, since mathematician John
von Neumann, quite thoroughly dead since 1957 is said to have been spotted
there.

It just gets better
and better. Using a mind-enhancing system designed at the facility, a junior
member of the team named Cameron “manifested” a Yeti that proceeded
to go bananas and wreck the place, only being destroyed after what I assume
were numerous thrill-a-minute adventures. Not to be outdone, after the creation
of something called a Time Tunnel, an advanced alien monster ravaged the
inside of the facility, smashing computers and munching on scientists, only
to be laid low by the fully automatic, hollow-pointed glory of the US military.
Let that be a warning to all space monsters: we know the score.

Conspiracy theorists
churn out details about the goings on at Montauk Point (but no evidence)
faster than anyone else can keep up with them. Others have undertaken the
Herculean effort of thoroughly debunking these insane stories, not the least
of which are the people that run the Montauk Point station as a historical
curiosity. However, I don’t think we need to go into much depth to
see that this story has more holes than a Swiss cheese rifle range target.

First of all, an underground
facility going down as far as 12 or more levels, at which hundreds or thousands
of people toil daily, has been constructed, without a single witness seeing
a single bulldozer, a single person entering the compound, or any of the
thousands of tons of building materials and equipment that would be needed?
I don’t think so.

Similar to that point,
the conspiracy theorists would have you believe that thousands of people
are working in underground labs that have never once, to our knowledge,
been replenished with new supplies such as food and toilet paper. Either
the government stocked up with 40 years worth of rations when the place
was built in the 1950s, or the people inside get all of their nutrition
by psychically detecting how much I love buffalo wings. I bet that could
feed quite a few people.

The thing that I like
best about this story is when people who are clearly not scientists try
and say things scientifically. For instance, they claim that there is a
particle accelerator at Montauk Point. The simple fact is that particle
accelerators are not trivial devices to construct: they cost hundreds of
millions of dollars and often have diameters on the order of miles. People
also claim that Montauk Point has developed technologies such as “particle
beam radar” and “high powered radio frequency transmissions”
that they used to various nefarious effects. The first seems to be something
that was made up after seeing one too many episodes of Star Trek;
the second is a mish-mash of several genuine scientific words that is, in
the end, meaningless.

So why was the site
closed but not demolished? First, boaters in Long Island Sound liked it.
It was a much better landmark than the relatively tiny lighthouse nearby.
Second, because of historical value: it is the only surviving SAGE radar
system in the world. It has been placed on the registry of historic places
and there are currently plans for the development of a museum and information
center specializing on the Cold War. Despite all of the preparations for
this, no one has yet uncovered any subterranean bases.

Be seeing you.

Another view of the Montauk SAGE radar. Or is it really
a space-age superweapon?

Reader Comments:

Aaron,

I tripped somehow over the Montauk
project (which I just discovered; I am amazed at the amount of drooling
going on over an abandoned military site which is now parkland). I landed
at your Iron Skeptic site. I have read only a couple of articles (and some
of the feedback) and I am in love; I want to have your babies or I want
you have my babies – that may be somewhat hyperbolic since (I think)
we are both males and I, for one, am straight [lotta punctuation, including
a semicolon, there, huh?]. ß-does it call for a period here?

In any event, it’s almost
0300 and you have kept me up past my bedtime I’ll be back on the site
tomorrow.

Thanks for the great articles
in a readable style with a dash of humor.

By the way, I’m in love
with Randi too.

- Bob Jakob

Authors Response:Our babies would be unlikely to be pretty, but what
grammatical Titans they would be!